You meet someone, perhaps you go on a date or two, and they have your phone number. And now you wait. Which insect will they manifest into? Do you have a cricket on your hands? Or do you have a gnat?
I only make two distinctions because rarely, and I mean rarely, do you find another comparable species of insect when it comes to communication styles in the dating world. Allow me to explain.
The Cricket
Oh the agony of crickets. You know that feeling when you’re sitting back, waiting, hoping, willing someone to call you, text you, email you, send a smoke signal—anything? Similar to the dead of night, all is silent but the mind numbing singsong of crickets.
When you first sense that you might have a cricket on your hands, you can become flooded with attempts to justify it. One guy friend of mine told me that he thought a girl wasn’t returning his calls to test him to see how truly interested he was. A “maybe” with a shrug and a smile was all I could muster.
If you and your friends are anything like my friends and me, you might try and weigh the possible scenarios. Perhaps your crush has a hectic schedule? Maybe they’re with someone and don’t want to be rude? The area they’re in doesn’t get adequate cellular service? Their phone could be all together broken? Wait, maybe it’s YOUR phone that’s broken! That must be it. You have a friend do a test text. Nope, it’s not your phone. In the ultimate stretch, you ponder the possibility of an accident that has rendered them hospitalized without the cognitive skills necessary to call. Hey, it’s possible.
You decide to put your phone down and walk away from it. You temper your anxiety in your phone’s absence thinking there could be a text or voicemail just waiting for you when you return to it. You pick it up and flip it open. Nothing but the time staring you in the face, almost mocking you. Chirp, chirp.
As a woman, I tend to subscribe to the theory often directed to me as a child—don’t speak unless spoken to. So as someone who very, very rarely makes initial contact, I have encountered my share of crickets. During one particularly agonizing bout, after receiving several texts over the course of the day from a girlfriend of mine, I called her and borderline hysterically begged her to stop texting me, because every time my phone vibrated my heart jumped into my throat.
Worse than an absence of contact is the absence of response to your contact. You call, you text, or you email, and yet you receive no response. A similar justification process begins, this time convincing yourself that your text message must not have gone through despite the blinding check mark in your sent box saying otherwise. In the hours that tick by, the one cricket you started with begins to multiply. By the time a day or two passes, the crickets have multiplied several times over and are now parading down your street. You can’t help but hear them. In fact, they are becoming deafening. With every call, text message, or email that comes through to you from everyone but the one you’re waiting for, it’s as if the cricket parade stops, allowing them to point and laugh at you, and then it’s back to marching they go.
The Gnat
The gnat has traditionally been a female role. But for some reason—perhaps my choice of perfume—most of the men I’ve encountered have taken on the form of a gnat.
A harmless insect, with neither a sting nor a bite, is seemingly impossible to get out of your face once around you. At first you might simply duck or shift positions unsuccessfully, and then you become forced to swat at them irritatingly. Before you know it you’re at your breaking point and CLAP, you smash them between your hands. You might feel remorseful for a moment, yet the peace brought about by their absence soothes your guilt.
